commonly elapsing between purchase and sale in the trade, but also allowances for such loss as might occur in transit by death, illness, accident or escape.  At some periods, furthermore, slave prices fell so rapidly that the prospect of profit for the speculator vanished.  At Columbus, Georgia, in December, 1844, for example, it was reported that a coffle from North Carolina had been marched back for want of buyers.[40] But losses of this sort were more than offset in the long run by the upward trend of prices which was in effect throughout the most of the ante-bellum period.  The Southern planters sometimes cut into the business of the traders by going to the border states to buy and bring home in person the slaves they needed.[41] The building of railways speeded the journeys and correspondingly reduced the costs.  The Central of Georgia Railroad improved its service in 1858 by instituting a negro sleeping car [42]—­an accommodation which apparently no railroad has furnished in the post-bellum decades.

[Footnote 40:  Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 31, 1844.]

[Footnote 41:  Andrews, Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade, p.171.]

While the traders were held in common contempt, the incidents and effects of their traffic were viewed with mixed emotions.  Its employment of shackles was excused only on the ground of necessary precaution.  Its breaking up of families was generally deplored, although it was apologized for by thick-and-thin champions of everything Southern with arguments that negro domestic ties were weak at best and that the separations were no more frequent than those suffered by free laborers at the North under the stress of economic necessity.  Its drain of money from the districts importing the slaves was regretted as a financial disadvantage.  On the other hand, the citizens of the exporting states were disposed to rejoice doubly at being saved from loss by the depreciation of property on their hands [43] and at seeing the negro element in their population begin to dwindle;[44] but even these considerations were in some degree offset, in Virginia at least, by thoughts that the shrinkage of the blacks was not enough to lessen materially the problem of racial adjustments, that it was prime young workmen and women rather than culls who were being sold South, that white immigration was not filling their gaps, and that accordingly land prices were falling as slave prices rose.[45]

[Footnote 42:  Central of Georgia Railroad Company Report for 1859.]

[Footnote 43:  National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), Jan. 19, 1833.]

[Footnote 44:  R.R.  Howison, History of Virginia (Richmond, Va., 1846-1848), II. 519, 520.]

[Footnote 45:  Edmund Ruffin, “The Effects of High Prices of Slaves,” in DeBow’s Review, XXVI, 647-657 (June, 1859).]